Spinoza, a ética dos afetos e a clínica analítica

Abstract

In his seminar on psychoanalysis’ four fundamental concepts, Jacques Lacan slings an enunciation that would have become the main part of his work’s guiding thread: the unconscious’ statute is ethical, not ontical. Would he have then met Baruch Spinoza, whose ontology is made ethically? By qualifying Spinoza’s philosophy as practical, Deleuze had already been indicating a deep reversion of thinking, and, with it, a conquest of immanence. It was up to psychoanalysis, specially through the idea of drive, to clinically operationalize this ethical conquest. The affects’ dimension wins the first plane. Happy and sad passions, active joys, are now indexes of thinking: they signal increase and decrease of power, i.e., of the ability to act, feel, think, know. These orientations of thought, or clinical steering wheels, reappear in the analytical experience’s context, with the notions of life and death drive.